Excited by politics? In your dreams ...

On the night of last November's presidential election, an 18-year-old woman from California dreamed she was watching the news on television when George W. Bush came into the room and stole her bag of crisps.

A 45-year-old man from Texas imagined Mr Bush and his adversary, Al Gore, as pitbulls going at each other while Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, walked away into the sunset.

A 58-year-old woman from Virginia dreamed she was arguing with her clock radio about the incoming election results but the radio "can't hear me and doesn't care".

November 7, 2000, was a troubled night for many people, it seems, not just the politicians waiting on tenterhooks to find out who had won the closest US presidential election in history.

According to Kelly Bulkeley, a university professor who has been collecting political dreams since 1992, it may have been the most restless night in the nation's history. Presenting his findings yesterday at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams in Santa Cruz, California, Prof Bulkeley said the dreams he had collected far outstripped those from the previous two presidential elections, in 1992 and 1996, for their number, intensity and sheer angst.

"A vast number of people, including the entirety of the country's political leadership, did not sleep at all, staying up all night in a state of anxiety and confusion," he said. The dreams did not let up throughout the 37-day post-election struggle. As the drama focussed on the recounts in Florida, many people had Floridian dreams involving sharks and, in some cases, menacingly transformed hanging chads.

One 30-year-old man from Oregon told Prof. Bulkeley at one stage: "I have never experienced an entire week in which I repeatedly dreamed about political/world events. I feel the whole recount situation so dominates my waking life that it is reflected in my dreaming life. The dreams are almost exclusively about counting votes."

Conventional academic wisdom suggests that political and other public events do not impinge on most people's dream life, a supposition that Prof. Bulkeley now believes is false. Back in 1992, not only did his subjects dream about Bill Clinton and - particularly - the jug-eared Reform Party candidate, Ross Perot, during the campaign; they also had repeated dreams about Mr Clinton once he was declared the winner.

These "dreams of Bill" were "casual, intimate, sometimes romantic", Prof. Bulkeley said. Curiously, he has not received a single report of a dream about Mr Bush since the end of the electoral showdown on December 12. In dreaming as in the real world, it seems Mr Clinton has never ceased to elicit strong reactions, while Mr Bush seems to elicit little reaction at all.

There may also be a political imperative at work. In his research, Prof. Bulkeley has noticed that Republicans have more nightmares than Democrats. While left-leaning people tend to be more bizarre in their night-time imaginings - and more interested in non-conjugal sex - people on the right seem gripped by anxiety, often focussing on the nuclear family.

One dream Prof. Bulkeley collected had a conservative man confronting a grizzly bear in a public toilet and panicking because his gun wouldn't work. Prof. Bulkeley's paper is the latest of several pieces of evidence that last year's election affected Americans in unusual and unexpected ways.

A study that appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times showed that many Americans became addicted to the electoral contest on 24-hour rolling news stations and suffered withdrawal symptoms when it was all over.

A woman told the paper she realised she had gone too far in her obsession when she went to a party and realised she could recite verbatim a statement by James Baker, Mr Bush's point man in Florida.